Brokerage back offices are filled with time-consuming tasks where errors can easily occur, from reviewing transaction documents and checking compliance requirements to reconciling commission statements.
The challenge isn't simply keeping up with changing rules. It’s making sure the right documents and information are reviewed across many transactions. A survey from 2024 of more than 100 brokerage leaders by TotalBrokerage and T3 Sixty found transaction management ranked as the top technology concern among real estate offices.
MaxHome.ai, part of the National Association of REALTORS®’ Second Century Ventures 2026 REACH program, is trying to ease the burden. The company offers an AI tool to automate repetitive document reviews, compliance checks and other transaction management tasks.
Before creating MaxHome, Divya Aathresh spent several years at Better.com, helping grow its real estate business and working closely with agents and other teams on brokerage operations. That experience gave her a firsthand look at the administrative demands of running a real estate business—insights she drew on when developing MaxHome’s technology. Aathresh talks with REALTOR® News about how her previous brokerage experience shaped the company’s approach to addressing a growing pain point for real estate professionals.
What did you see happening inside brokerages that convinced you the back office was where AI could have a big impact?
AATHRESH: “What we saw was a combination of a very manual problem inside brokerages and a major shift in what AI could actually do. Having run a brokerage, we knew how much time people were spending reading documents, finding information, checking forms, comparing information across documents and systems, and following up when something was missing or incorrect.
“What changed with AI was its ability to actually read and understand language. Real estate transactions are largely made up of documents, emails and unstructured information. Historically, software could store those documents, but it couldn't really understand what was inside them.
“For the first time, AI could read a contract or disclosure, understand the context, extract the relevant information and help determine what needed to happen next. That made it possible to automate work like document review and transaction processing in a way that simply wasn't feasible before.
“And because the back office represents such a significant portion of a brokerage's operating costs, we saw an opportunity to have a meaningful impact—not just by reducing manual work, but by allowing people to spend much more of their time on higher-value work.”
What are some of the areas brokerages have leaned into as part of back-office automation?
AATHRESH: “While document review is where brokerages have leaned in most heavily early on, [we’re also] making sure everything expected is in the right place, in the right order, at the right moment. A few other prominent areas brokerages have leaned into with us include accounting reconciliation and cross-sell.
“On accounting reconciliation, we check for discrepancies between the commission statement, the purchase contract, the internal commission calculation, and the settlement statement, work that's highly manual today, and that we've fully automated.
“On cross-sell, because we're reviewing every document and building deep context on what's happening in a transaction, our partners can cross-sell far more effectively, looping in an affiliated mortgage company or title company at exactly the right moment. We're increasingly seeing that play out across multiple affiliated channels.”
Compliance is one area where mistakes can be costly and legally risky. How does MaxHome use AI to review documents and identify potential compliance issues—and how do you ensure the technology is accurate enough for something as high-stakes as a real estate transaction?
AATHRESH: “We are building MaxHome as a reliable partner to the compliance team, giving them a much more powerful first review with automated checks and validation based on years of real estate transaction data.
“The important part is that we're not asking the AI to make every judgment on its own. The system is designed to automate what can be reliably automated and surface exceptions to the right person when human judgment is needed. That allows the brokerage to maintain control while reducing more than 80% of the amount of manual review required.”
Real estate transactions can vary by state, brokerage and even transaction type. Does the AI system take into account those differences? Can you offer up an example of how the system adapts to different requirements?
AATHRESH: “Absolutely. That's actually one of the most powerful aspects of the product. Requirements can change based on the state, brokerage, transaction type, property type and even information contained within the transaction itself. MaxHome's workflows are built to apply and adapt to those specific requirements.
“For example, a transaction may include a specific addendum—say, an inspection addendum. The system can identify that the addendum is present, read what it actually says, and then ask for whatever it calls for. If the addendum specifies that certain repairs or a reinspection are required before closing, the system knows to request that documentation, like a repair invoice or an updated inspection report, before the file can be considered complete. So instead of applying one generic checklist to every file, you're applying the appropriate rules to that specific transaction, based on what's actually written into it.”
Can you give an example of a transaction where MaxHome caught something, like flagging a potential compliance issue or preventing a problem that otherwise could have gone unnoticed?
AATHRESH: “A good example is one that comes up more than people expect: A payment discrepancy between the settlement statement and the commission statement. We had a case where the settlement statement showed the brokerage got paid one amount, but when we checked it against the commission statement, there was $5,500 unaccounted for. It had been given out as credits. The system caught the mismatch right away instead of it slipping through.
“We also see this happen consistently with flat fees, a separate fee that's often left off the commission statement entirely and easily gets missed in a manual review. Traditionally, someone would have to catch these manually, cross-referencing figures across multiple documents and hoping nothing got missed. With MaxHome, the system compares those numbers automatically as soon as the documents come in and flags any mismatch right away.
“We see the same thing happen on the compliance side. A disclosure gets submitted without the required seller or buyer signature, and it looks fine on the surface, but the system catches what a quick glance would miss.
“The value is that you're catching these issues earlier and more consistently, without depending on someone manually reviewing were of every document at exactly the right time.”
Looking ahead, how much of the compliance and transaction management process do you think AI can realistically automate?
AATHRESH: “We think most of the repetitive work can ultimately be automated. We're already seeing brokerages reallocate up to 80% of the time their teams previously spent on certain manual review and data-entry activities.
“The bigger shift is that agents are no longer stuck waiting on a person to get to their files. AI can handle the routine work continuously and bring people in when their expertise is actually needed. That changes the role of the back office from manually processing every file to managing exceptions, resolving more complex issues and supporting the business at a much greater scale. And for an agent, this means faster answers and fewer dropped balls.”
